"Энди Макнаб. День независимости (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

hadn't been a day when he didn't come into her conversation. I still tended
to cut away from stuff like this, but the way she saw it, he'd been her
husband for fifteen years and dead for only a little over one.
In the whole of my life as a Special Forces soldier, and later, as a
"K' working on deniable operations for the Intelligence Service, I'd always
tried to turn my back on the guilt, remorse and self-doubt that always
followed a job; what was done was done. But watching her trying to deal with
it moved me more than I'd thought possible.
I'd been sent to Panama in September 2000 to coerce a local drugs
racketeer into helping the West. Carrie and Aaron had been my local
contacts; they'd been environmental scientists running a research station
near the Colombian border, and on the CIA payroll as low-level intelligence
gatherers. I was staying at their house when the racketeer's boys came
looking for me, and Aaron had paid the price.
There hadn't been many days since when I didn't wonder if there'd been
something more I could have done to save him.
There was another photograph of Carrie in her mother's kitchen at
Marblehead. She was cooking clam chowder. Just to one side of her was a
framed black and white portrait of her with her father, George, a handsome,
square-jawed all-American in a uniform, probably taken in the early sixties.
I gazed at the one of her standing outside her college. Carrie had been
encouraging me to give the place a try; I'd always loved medieval history,
and had been reading quite a lot about the Crusades lately. I'd told her I
wasn't sure the whole mature-student thing was me, working in Starbucks,
being bollocked by an eighteen-year-old team leader. I hadn't quite got
round to telling her that my formal education had ended when I was fifteen,
so the college was unlikely to take me on as a janitor, let alone enrol me
on one of its courses.
I guessed there was quite a lot of stuff, one way or the other,i that I
hadn't told Carrie. There was my trip to Algeria, for a start. It wasn't the
job itself; I wouldn't have said a word about that anyway. It was the fact
that I'd promised her I'd never get involved in dirty work again. The carrot
George had dangled in front of me was irresistible; with American
citizenship papers in my pocket, I'd be free to work at whatever I wanted.
But I wasn't sure Carrie would appreciate the method behind the madness.
The story I'd told her was that I'd been offered three weeks' work
escorting thrill-seekers into Egypt. After the 9/11 attacks, tourism to the
Middle East had all but dried up, and the few travellers still brave enough
to go wanted minders. Carrie agreed it was a good idea for me to make some
money before I started the long process of applying for citizenship. Until
that happened, all I could do were menial jobs, so money would be tight. I
hadn't a clue how I was going to explain to her why my citizenship had come
through so fast, but I'd cross that bridge when I came to it. I sat and
looked out at the dull grey day as ice-covered trees zoomed past along the
side of the track and vehicles in the distance with cold engines tailed
exhaust fumes behind them. It wasn't a good start to us being together, but
it was done now. I should just look to the future.
After two days of mincing around, ninety metres below the
Mediterranean, following the North African coastline, we'd finally made it
back into Alexandria. The weather had closed in as predicted about ten hours